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The centenary of the foundation of the psychoanalytic journal Imago is a suitable occasion to reflect on topics of psychoanalysis and religion. Its Latin name, imago, has a very broad spectrum of meanings. Besides the easily understandable one of its English derivative—image—it refers also to the wax masks of the deceased carried in ancient Rome during funeral processions and for the images of the ancestors; it also may refer to a dream image, a ghost, a shadow, a metaphor, an imagination. The word is related to the verb imitari, to imitate. And of course it has much to do with the image of a god or of “God.” And that is the main content of the following study: a psychoanalytic inquiry into the inner contradictions in the imago of God, specifically the God of monotheism.
The centenary of the journal and the subject of this essay immediately coincide with a parallel centenary: that of the appearance of Freud's first book length study on the origins and psychology of religions, Totem and Taboo. This important and yet nowadays rather neglected work was first published as four essays to inaugurate Imago in 1912-1913. In the following, I will repeatedly refer to this extremely bold synthesis of widely disparate phenomena. Its almost fantastic reconstruction of mankind's and man's outer and inner history brings together two enormously important phenomena of religious prehistory and anthropology: the existence of widespread taboo systems and the formation of totemic proto-religions. The latter refers